


après la tempête

by inlovewithnight



Category: Clouds of Sils Maria
Genre: F/F, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 23:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3788059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Val’s next job is with a producer in New York. Music, not movies. Change of pace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	après la tempête

Val’s next job is with a producer in New York. Music, not movies. Change of pace.

Paul is as much of a narcissist as Maria, but in a different way. That’s a change of pace, too. Paul doesn’t require that Val subsume all of her feelings for him; he couldn’t possibly be less interested in how she feels about anything. It’s a relief. She knows in time it will start to bother her, and that eventually she won’t be able to stand it, but for now it’s a relief, and she’ll take it.

He tends to start late in the morning and work late into the night. Val tries to keep her mornings skewed at least an hour ahead of him, preferably an hour and a half. She needs that time to think, to curl her fingers around a cup of coffee and her first few cigarettes, to bring her world into order and banish any traitorous thoughts that grew up overnight.

She is not allowed to think about Switzerland, or Maria, or that stupid fucking play. Those are the rules she set for herself. She has trouble sticking to them when she’s asleep, though.

And when she’s first awake, before her stretch of pulling herself together, she’s weak then, too. She lies in bed staring at the ceiling, picturing Maria’s face when she stormed back into the house and found Val halfway packed and all the way done with her shit. She remembers the crack when Maria’s hand hit her face. She hadn’t been slapped like that in years. It made her eyes tear, her teeth slide painfully against each other.

That’s when she makes herself get up and go to the coffee maker, find her cigarettes, fire up her iPad. Begin the process of starting her day and putting the rules in place.

She usually slips up over her first cup, too, and runs some Google searches. Maria, the play, Jo-Anne. She never learns anything she didn’t already know, but the routine is comfortable.

The reviews of _Maloja Snake_ are mixed, but they all agree on two points: Maria’s performance was good, and Jo-Anne’s was terrible. Val is stranded between pride and embarrassment every time she reads another version of the same conclusion. On the one hand, of course Maria was good. Maria is always good. On the other, she burned up so much of her standing in Maria’s eyes by praising Jo-Anne’s acting. Even if it didn’t matter in the end, it stings to feel like she should retroactively defend her position harder.

Jo-Anne has already moved on to a period epic shooting in Australia. Maria is searching for her next project and splitting her time between London and Paris. She isn’t particularly attractive paparazzi-bait at this point, but there are enough b-list stringer pictures for Val to keep up with her.

She lingers over pictures that include Maria’s new assistant in the frame. Tall, androgynous, given to the same nondescript black blazers and skinny jeans as Val herself. Probably hungry for the opportunity, like Val was when she started. A little snooping turns up that her name is Mei-Ling. The world of personal assistants is tighter than it seems; it wouldn’t take much to get Mei-Ling’s number or her e-mail, get in touch. Tattle on her old boss like a whiny kid.

Those thoughts are always where Val makes herself close the computer and go down to the sidewalk for her next cigarette. Like anyone with a decent lawyer, Maria had presented Val with the NDA on the day she started, so that no matter how tempestuously things ended, she was already protected. 

Tempestuous was definitely one word for the last day in the mountains.

Maria screaming at her, the white-hot pain of the slap, Val trying to evade the words and flying hands. Going around and around in the tight space of the house, Val a rabbit on the run and Maria the fox behind her, cursing in French and crying—Val thinks she remembers her crying—but a lot of it is a blur of noise and pain.

Finally being cornered in the kitchen, Maria closing on her as she backed away, until she hit the table and was caught. She’d had that bruise across the back of her thighs for a week.

Maria kissing her, harsh and desperate and too many teeth, and Val kissing back, because _finally_ , the ghost in the room come into the light, the thing she thought they’d been tiptoeing around all along, and maybe it would be less awful once they both finally _felt_ it.

Val opening her mouth, and Maria biting her lip, the hot burst of blood and pain, but she didn’t care, she could take it, what was a little more pain after all the baggage and two-decades-old emotional shit Maria had been heaping on her for months?

And then Maria pulling back, grabbing Val’s face in her hands, staring at her with rage and accusation in her eyes, face twisted into a harsh mask instead of the careful composure Val used as her barometer of things being okay. The more hairline cracks, ones the rest of the world would never notice but she had trained herself to see, the less okay things were.

Maria’s anger had consumed the whole surface, then.

“How could you?” she spit in Val’s face. “How could you walk away from me?”

Val couldn’t forget her face like that, lit up with disappointment and fury that Val hadn’t been a good girl. Maria was beautiful, even enraged, without a trace of makeup and with her hair bristling around her face like an angry halo, that stupid butch haircut that was too on-the-nose and all wrong for the character and Val had _told_ her, had told her, but she insisted and Klaus was so glad to have her he wouldn’t fight that fight.

Val pulled back from her, grinding the edge of the table into the back of her thighs again. “Because I’m done. I’m leaving.”

“You cannot leave me, Valentine.”

Val’s voice shook. She remembered that. “I am.”

And she did. That was the end of that.

After her cigarette on the sidewalk, she packs it away in her head every day. It’s not a big thing. It doesn’t define her. It’s just a mistake that happened, when she let her feelings get embedded in her work, when she let herself think she mattered to the person she worked for.

She gets closer and closer to the point where she can say, “It was a long time ago,” and leave it behind. Not quite yet. But she’s closer.

Every so often she thinks about calling Maria. Every so often she looks up plane tickets to London, to Paris. Maybe they could talk as equals, now. Maybe it’s been long enough that it could be different.

But probably not. 

She could wait her whole life and it won’t be the right time for that. The whole idea is unpredictable, alchemical, like trying to guess when the Maloja Snake will form in the hills above Sils-Maria.

And she knows better than to do that again.


End file.
